Federated Clouds Task Force is starting up

The goal to integrate virtualised resources in the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is one step closer. On Tuesday 9 August the Technology Coordination Board (TCB) gave a mandate to the community to create the EGI Federated Clouds Task Force.

Over the next 18 months, the task force will work with the community to develop a ‘blueprint’ for EGI resource centres that wish to securely federate and share their virtualised environments as part of the production infrastructure. Other goals include:

Define and prototype solutions for monitoring, accounting and advertising through the information services virtualised resources

Investigate and analyse requirements

Provide feedback to relevant technology providers (both within and external to the TCB)

Identify issues that need to be addressed by other areas of EGI (e.g. policy, operations, support & dissemination)

The task force will also work closely with user communities willing to become early adopters of the resulting virtualised infrastructure to help prioritise its development.

Michel Drescher, Technology Manager at EGI.eu explains: “The idea is to produce a blueprint document with advice and, where available full documentation, to resource centres and users on how to engage with the federated virtualised environment.” The blueprint will be made available on the EGI Wiki.

“The task force will seek to find out what resource centres actually need to start their own virtualised resources,” Drescher adds. “While expanding the test bed, the task force will provide best practices, recommendations, and documentation for user communities, resource centres and software providers on how to engage with EGI in a federated virtualised infrastructure.”

The EGI Federated Clouds Task Force is looking for active members that wish to contribute their knowledge, resources and software to set up a test bed for a federated virtualised infrastructure in EGI:

If you are looking to become an active member of EGI's virtualisation efforts then contact fedcloud-tf@mailman.egi.eu.

If you are interested in contributing to the virtualisation discussion or would like to keep updated on ongoing activities, feel free to use or join cloud-discuss@mailman.egi.eu.